The thing is even countries do not want to enforce sane quotas within their own territorial waters, even when they know their own fish stocks might vanish.
You can enforce stuff in your own waters - that's what your navy is for, and even then many countries are unwilling to have those quotas - so that their fishermen can fish themselves out of a job and crash their own industry? It's crazy.
I personally wish all the countries would go for sustainable _fishing_. The current fishing industry is nearly completely broken.
Practically all the scientists asked about it know what order of magnitude the fishing quotas should be, but they are always set higher for political reasons.
shashdot never reported this; the death toll was hundreds of times larger. slashdot didnt give a shit because it wasnt tech news; i sadly respect that.
Yeah seems to me that Intel is actually helping Sandforce fix the bugs in Sandforce's product. Not for free of course, but one wonders about the long term strategic reasons for this. They could have let Sandforce keep churning out SSDs with buggy firmware.
Maybe in a world with more fast, cheap and reliable drives, Intel can sell more high power CPUs? Or this is a move against Samsung?
If we develop post-humans and/or strong AI (and hit that "singularity" thing) in the wrong environment/culture, we normal humans won't be pets. We'd more likely be worshippers+slaves, livestock or vermin.
One of the arguments against "basic income" is it may reduce the incentive to work. But that's assuming that everyone has to work.
If robots and other automation can do the jobs, why should a few take everything and become ultra-rich, assuming the resulting increased productivity can actually provide basic income for everyone?
If you're in the IT line, you're taking part in the process of replacing more and more humans with automation.
You might be one of those who objects if some/much of the resulting productivity or $$$ gets transferred to providing basic income for everyone, but are you really happier with the current situation where some/much of the resulting $$$ gets transferred to making a few people filthy rich? I'd personally prefer the basic income thing. Just seems more civilized. And you could still have filthy rich people...
Perhaps if you still need to encourage people to contribute, make it so that if you want to vote, you need to have worked a certain number of hours within 5 years. But a rich person or great contributor still only gets one vote.
If you want to have say, you have to contribute, otherwise you are a (hopefully well-treated) _pet_ of Advanced Human Civilization, with no votes.
Might not be a good idea to disenfranchise people like that, but it's just a suggestion:).
a more experienced person would know to avoid using floats to save monetary values,etc...
I'm an older person who knows to avoid floats for money values, etc. But I'm in a 3rd world country and my salary here is far from USD60k. And definitely nowhere near USD150k.
A lot of tech jobs can be outsourced, so I'm wondering why so many people in the USA keep saying in effect "we need more people in easily outsourced jobs".
I may not be as good as the above average US coders, but I think I can compete with your college freshies. And one day I might have to - because the bosses in my country might refuse to hire me because I'm older and more expensive:).
One of the first things I do at work. Definitely check my email more than once a day.
If you can get people to attend stand-up meeting, why can't you get people to check their email/mailing list for status updates, and to send status updates? They don't have to read all emails. Just the status update ones. I'm assuming the people you hire can read faster than most people can speak or listen (with actual retention) - which hopefully is true for your team.
If they are somehow not able or willing to do email status updates, I guess you can require them to attend status update meetings.
Most of our team NEVER checks their mail. How much time do you think that saves?
Depends on how you use email. Just like it depends on how you use meetings. After all you could use a very similar statement against meetings: "Most of our team NEVER attend meetings. How much time do you think that saves?".
Meetings can be ignored or missed too. If you can enforce meeting attendance and coherent talk you can do that for status update emails too. People can forget what was said in the stand-up meeting, whereas you can go through the status update emails again.
If two way communication is allowed during the meeting then the meeting provides lower latency communications than emails and so can be superior. But so many people were saying among the defining characteristic of these meetings are: no interruption, no discussion, no questions. And that's what I found weird.
Do tell me what do you do in those 15 minute stand up meetings? So far I hear others say it's just status updates, with minimal interaction (otherwise it takes longer than 15 minutes).
If that's the case they might as well just email those "brief" status updates or share them online in other ways. We're in the tech line, and we should be able to read and write reasonably fast.
Seems like poor time management to me, to force everyone to stand around for the exact _same_ contiguous 15 minutes in that day just to hear stuff that they could read and write within 5 minutes (which don't have to be the exact same contiguous 5 minutes for everyone, could start at 9:05am for one person and 8:26am for another).
I can understand the purpose of such meetings if you're dealing with workers that can't read well. But people in the IT industry should be well-versed with using email and IM.
Yes I do know there are good reasons to have certain types of "physical domain" meetings, where email and IM are inferior methods. But I'm still waiting for someone to show why these 15 minute stand up meetings are superior to doing the same thing in email/IM.
The key to making these meetings go fast is: participants are not allowed to interrupt, discuss, or ask questions while other people are giving status updates.
If that's really the only purpose of the meeting why can't the status updates be emailed or shared some other way? Why does there need to be a meeting and a forced "serialization" of the process?
After all if you are not allowed to ask questions, discuss or interrupt, then each person might as well just write what they would have said in a brief message then email or share it some other way with everyone involved. That way you don't need to waste so much "real-time" by forcing synchronization and serialization.
So unless there's some other reason it sounds rather inefficient to me. I'm assuming of course that the participants read/scan status updates much faster than most people speak or listen.
But you could do the same thing for sit down meetings too. If the chairperson is focused and has the authority, the meeting can be effective and short, whether it is stand up or sit down.
People have written plenty of stuff about holding effective meetings, and reasons to hold meetings. Some even suggest writing down the rough cost of the meeting on the whiteboard as the first thing, to help get people focused;).
As for:
* I did this yesterday * I'm doing this today * Here are my impediments (if any).
If you try and fix problems (impediments) in the stand-up - you're doing it wrong.
If that's all you're doing then it seems a waste of time. That's the sort of thing that would be better off done by getting people to email updates or do something similar. Why you are forcing this to be serialized, when it can be done in parallel? Then that person who rambles on, can ramble on in an email and not waste everybody's time. And the project manager can tell that person privately to not ramble so much, without her losing face in front of team members, OR let her ramble, if she appears to be able to still get her stuff done anyway, the extra information might come in handy (assuming project manager can read fast).
Even if there's no rambling, if there are 15 people in a team, you're forcing 15 people to stand around for a minimum of 7 minutes (not including synchronization (waiting for everyone to arrive), initialization and clean-up time - which can be significant). Just to hear each other talk for 30 seconds, one after another. What's the point?
I can understand holding physical meetings where the boss can look everyone in the eye, do the "General motivating the troops" or "General announcing major defeat" speech. And also 1 to 1 meetings where a manager meets with a team member to try to fix/workaround any potential problems before they blow up. If you're physically in front of the person, it is easier to gauge the emotional state and know that a rant is about to begin, so that you can shut up and let the person let it all out, and just nod acknowledgement or stuff like that. Rather than type *nods* every now and then;).
But it seems a waste of time to hold a meeting just to share status updates.
but the current craze for stand-up meetings, scrum, agile, etc., are being driven by tech staff.
That's daft and primitive though. The real tech way of having more productive meetings is: require most meetings to be done via text instant-messaging (IM): That way: 1) you automatically get minutes of the meeting (the bosses could require the transcripts to be posted somewhere). 2) you can be in multiple meetings at the same time, potentially even chairing one meeting while attending a few others. Heck the bosses could attend them all, not to chime in like an idiot, but in case his/her official approval/opinion for something is required (reduce latency!). 3) you can do work and other stuff (slashdot, youtube)[1] while attending the meetings. 4) You can set "AFK", go to the toilet, come back, and scroll up to see what happened while you went AFK, without requiring everyone to recap or wait for you.
Now of course programmers generally are better off with an uninterrupted stretch for heavy-duty coding. So what bosses could do is require most/all meetings to be within a certain time range of the day. With IM meetings, it is not a showstopper if you have a few meetings scheduled for the same time.
This way bosses can squeeze even more out of employees;).
Of course this requires employees who can actually read and type at reasonable speeds, and multitask.
With normal physical presence meetings (stand-up or not), you could have 5 people mostly idle, with the only the chairperson reasonably busy, for the entire meeting time. Not very efficient.
IM meetings could take a bit longer - many people don't type as fast as they can speak and do a normal presentation, but I don't think that's a show-stopper.
FWIW, are stand-up meetings really more productive and effective than other sort of physical meetings? Or are they merely shorter, leaving more time to get the work done... You can actually have productive meetings - you must have a good reason for meetings, agenda, etc etc (plenty of stuff written on that already).
[1] This gets harder once there are too many meetings in parallel that require your concentration, but hey you want productive right?
Mosquitoes can navigate and orient in dynamic environments without requiring external cameras and computers ( http://www.vicon.com/company/documents/UPENNGraspLab.pdf ). They can find their own sources of fuel, and avoid active and passive threats. They can even produce new mosquitoes in a few days/weeks without a factory.
They can get confused by bright/UV lights, but it's still quite impressive considering their brains are so tiny.
So these bots are interesting, but there's plenty of room for improvements:). We're still not in danger of Skynet bots yet...
BTW, the company not only pays for the tests, but I also get a salary increase for each cert earned.
As I said, that's fine since the company is paying for it. Even better that you get more $$$ out of it.
So, would you really consider the MCSE certification worth paying for out of your own pocket, and also worth your own private time to sit for the tests?
Note: I'm not talking about the "higher" Microsoft certifications.
Certifications (or titles) don't always augment. In my opinion an MCSE or equivalent low grade certification counts against you if you actually paid for it out of your own pocket. While it's not as bad as having one of those online doctorates, you've basically certified yourself as someone who voluntarily pays for useless stuff. Doesn't count against you if your employer insisted you took it, paid for it and you used it as a break from work...
There are far better Microsoft certifications to get. And if you're a "Microsoft Technical Fellow", that carries some weight.
Why can't that work come home? Mr. Obama asked. Mr. Jobs's reply was unambiguous. "Those jobs aren't coming back," he said, according to another dinner guest.
'You're headed for a one-term presidency,' Jobs told Obama at the outset. To prevent that, he said, the administration needed to be a lot more business-friendly. He described how easy it was to build a factory in China, and said that it was almost impossible to do so these days in America, largely because of regulations and unnecessary costs
Dell execs in contrast just say boring/"content free" stuff like:
"Extending our relationship with Foxconn allows us to help customers grow and succeed by making the most of their IT investments, in a way they've come to expect from Dell," said Sean Corkery, vice president of Dell's supply-chain operations.
"We expect our suppliers to employ the same high standards we do in our own facilities. We enforce these standards through a variety of tools, including the Electronics Industry code of conduct, business reviews with suppliers, self-assessments and audits."
You're blind in that eye, unlike if the screw on your glasses' earpiece falls out, in which case you're blind in both eyes.
The latter is easier to fix in the field with a bit of tape. Carrying gaffer/"duct" tape around isn't that difficult, and a soldier might find it useful for lots of other stuff.
I personally carry some tape in my wallet - it's wrapped flat around a small card so doesn't take much space (and yes I've actually used it a few times to fix stuff). Not sure if you could wrap "speed tape" that way and have it reusable.
Instead of that maybe the Aussies could try to convince the Chinese that Giant Gamba Grass in Australia has medicinal properties. Might go near extinct soon after, with Australian farmers having to grow gamba grass to meet the demand;).
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is even countries do not want to enforce sane quotas within their own territorial waters, even when they know their own fish stocks might vanish.
You can enforce stuff in your own waters - that's what your navy is for, and even then many countries are unwilling to have those quotas - so that their fishermen can fish themselves out of a job and crash their own industry? It's crazy.
I personally wish all the countries would go for sustainable _fishing_. The current fishing industry is nearly completely broken.
Practically all the scientists asked about it know what order of magnitude the fishing quotas should be, but they are always set higher for political reasons.
Then there's the huge bycatch problem.
let me contrast the headline with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake_and_tsunami
shashdot never reported this; the death toll was hundreds of times larger. slashdot didnt give a shit because it wasnt tech news; i sadly respect that.
And what's this? http://news.slashdot.org/story/04/12/26/1437228/quake-and-tsunami-devastate-south-asia
might i suggest instead that we crawl out of our basements,
You first. But don't forget to take your medication.
That period of exclusivity is what Intel gets out of it in the short-term and not long-term.
Intel generally thinks longer term than most US IT companies.
Yeah seems to me that Intel is actually helping Sandforce fix the bugs in Sandforce's product. Not for free of course, but one wonders about the long term strategic reasons for this. They could have let Sandforce keep churning out SSDs with buggy firmware.
Maybe in a world with more fast, cheap and reliable drives, Intel can sell more high power CPUs? Or this is a move against Samsung?
Hence this bug should be fixed: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/148440
A nice change from developed at Quanta in Taiwan and "the fabrication will be done in China".
;)
Unless of course it will be done in the US in dangerous sweatshops...
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Biological_citizens
If we develop post-humans and/or strong AI (and hit that "singularity" thing) in the wrong environment/culture, we normal humans won't be pets. We'd more likely be worshippers+slaves, livestock or vermin.
One of the arguments against "basic income" is it may reduce the incentive to work. But that's assuming that everyone has to work.
:).
If robots and other automation can do the jobs, why should a few take everything and become ultra-rich, assuming the resulting increased productivity can actually provide basic income for everyone?
If you're in the IT line, you're taking part in the process of replacing more and more humans with automation.
You might be one of those who objects if some/much of the resulting productivity or $$$ gets transferred to providing basic income for everyone, but are you really happier with the current situation where some/much of the resulting $$$ gets transferred to making a few people filthy rich? I'd personally prefer the basic income thing. Just seems more civilized. And you could still have filthy rich people...
Perhaps if you still need to encourage people to contribute, make it so that if you want to vote, you need to have worked a certain number of hours within 5 years. But a rich person or great contributor still only gets one vote.
If you want to have say, you have to contribute,
otherwise you are a (hopefully well-treated) _pet_ of Advanced Human Civilization, with no votes.
Might not be a good idea to disenfranchise people like that, but it's just a suggestion
At least one corporate security chiefs predicted such a scenario and prepared for it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rescorla#WTC_risk_assessment
To me there are many strange things about 9/11. The Israeli white van incident for instance:
http://rense.com/general44/those.htm
a more experienced person would know to avoid using floats to save monetary values,etc...
I'm an older person who knows to avoid floats for money values, etc. But I'm in a 3rd world country and my salary here is far from USD60k. And definitely nowhere near USD150k.
A lot of tech jobs can be outsourced, so I'm wondering why so many people in the USA keep saying in effect "we need more people in easily outsourced jobs".
I may not be as good as the above average US coders, but I think I can compete with your college freshies. And one day I might have to - because the bosses in my country might refuse to hire me because I'm older and more expensive :).
How often do you check you mail every day?
One of the first things I do at work. Definitely check my email more than once a day.
If you can get people to attend stand-up meeting, why can't you get people to check their email/mailing list for status updates, and to send status updates? They don't have to read all emails. Just the status update ones. I'm assuming the people you hire can read faster than most people can speak or listen (with actual retention) - which hopefully is true for your team.
If they are somehow not able or willing to do email status updates, I guess you can require them to attend status update meetings.
Most of our team NEVER checks their mail. How much time do you think that saves?
Depends on how you use email. Just like it depends on how you use meetings. After all you could use a very similar statement against meetings: "Most of our team NEVER attend meetings. How much time do you think that saves?".
Meetings can be ignored or missed too. If you can enforce meeting attendance and coherent talk you can do that for status update emails too. People can forget what was said in the stand-up meeting, whereas you can go through the status update emails again.
If two way communication is allowed during the meeting then the meeting provides lower latency communications than emails and so can be superior. But so many people were saying among the defining characteristic of these meetings are: no interruption, no discussion, no questions. And that's what I found weird.
Do tell me what do you do in those 15 minute stand up meetings? So far I hear others say it's just status updates, with minimal interaction (otherwise it takes longer than 15 minutes).
If that's the case they might as well just email those "brief" status updates or share them online in other ways. We're in the tech line, and we should be able to read and write reasonably fast.
Seems like poor time management to me, to force everyone to stand around for the exact _same_ contiguous 15 minutes in that day just to hear stuff that they could read and write within 5 minutes (which don't have to be the exact same contiguous 5 minutes for everyone, could start at 9:05am for one person and 8:26am for another).
I can understand the purpose of such meetings if you're dealing with workers that can't read well. But people in the IT industry should be well-versed with using email and IM.
Yes I do know there are good reasons to have certain types of "physical domain" meetings, where email and IM are inferior methods. But I'm still waiting for someone to show why these 15 minute stand up meetings are superior to doing the same thing in email/IM.
The key to making these meetings go fast is: participants are not allowed to interrupt, discuss, or ask questions while other people are giving status updates.
If that's really the only purpose of the meeting why can't the status updates be emailed or shared some other way? Why does there need to be a meeting and a forced "serialization" of the process?
After all if you are not allowed to ask questions, discuss or interrupt, then each person might as well just write what they would have said in a brief message then email or share it some other way with everyone involved. That way you don't need to waste so much "real-time" by forcing synchronization and serialization.
So unless there's some other reason it sounds rather inefficient to me. I'm assuming of course that the participants read/scan status updates much faster than most people speak or listen.
It's also a regular reminder to soldiers that they are merely the gun.
Someone else decides where it's pointed at.
But you could do the same thing for sit down meetings too. If the chairperson is focused and has the authority, the meeting can be effective and short, whether it is stand up or sit down.
People have written plenty of stuff about holding effective meetings, and reasons to hold meetings. Some even suggest writing down the rough cost of the meeting on the whiteboard as the first thing, to help get people focused ;).
As for:
* I did this yesterday
* I'm doing this today
* Here are my impediments (if any).
If you try and fix problems (impediments) in the stand-up - you're doing it wrong.
If that's all you're doing then it seems a waste of time. That's the sort of thing that would be better off done by getting people to email updates or do something similar. Why you are forcing this to be serialized, when it can be done in parallel? Then that person who rambles on, can ramble on in an email and not waste everybody's time. And the project manager can tell that person privately to not ramble so much, without her losing face in front of team members, OR let her ramble, if she appears to be able to still get her stuff done anyway, the extra information might come in handy (assuming project manager can read fast).
Even if there's no rambling, if there are 15 people in a team, you're forcing 15 people to stand around for a minimum of 7 minutes (not including synchronization (waiting for everyone to arrive), initialization and clean-up time - which can be significant). Just to hear each other talk for 30 seconds, one after another. What's the point?
I can understand holding physical meetings where the boss can look everyone in the eye, do the "General motivating the troops" or "General announcing major defeat" speech. And also 1 to 1 meetings where a manager meets with a team member to try to fix/workaround any potential problems before they blow up. If you're physically in front of the person, it is easier to gauge the emotional state and know that a rant is about to begin, so that you can shut up and let the person let it all out, and just nod acknowledgement or stuff like that. Rather than type *nods* every now and then ;).
But it seems a waste of time to hold a meeting just to share status updates.
but the current craze for stand-up meetings, scrum, agile, etc., are being driven by tech staff.
That's daft and primitive though. The real tech way of having more productive meetings is: require most meetings to be done via text instant-messaging (IM):
That way:
1) you automatically get minutes of the meeting (the bosses could require the transcripts to be posted somewhere).
2) you can be in multiple meetings at the same time, potentially even chairing one meeting while attending a few others. Heck the bosses could attend them all, not to chime in like an idiot, but in case his/her official approval/opinion for something is required (reduce latency!).
3) you can do work and other stuff (slashdot, youtube)[1] while attending the meetings.
4) You can set "AFK", go to the toilet, come back, and scroll up to see what happened while you went AFK, without requiring everyone to recap or wait for you.
Now of course programmers generally are better off with an uninterrupted stretch for heavy-duty coding. So what bosses could do is require most/all meetings to be within a certain time range of the day. With IM meetings, it is not a showstopper if you have a few meetings scheduled for the same time.
This way bosses can squeeze even more out of employees ;).
Of course this requires employees who can actually read and type at reasonable speeds, and multitask.
With normal physical presence meetings (stand-up or not), you could have 5 people mostly idle, with the only the chairperson reasonably busy, for the entire meeting time. Not very efficient.
IM meetings could take a bit longer - many people don't type as fast as they can speak and do a normal presentation, but I don't think that's a show-stopper.
FWIW, are stand-up meetings really more productive and effective than other sort of physical meetings? Or are they merely shorter, leaving more time to get the work done... You can actually have productive meetings - you must have a good reason for meetings, agenda, etc etc (plenty of stuff written on that already).
[1] This gets harder once there are too many meetings in parallel that require your concentration, but hey you want productive right?
McDonald's supersize meals can work as a preventative measure. Take one daily and you are unlikely to die of cancer or get Alzheimers. ;)
p.s. you might die a bit earlier though.
These flying bots remind me of you average Alaskan mosquito.
Those bots are not even half as advanced as a mosquito (and far from houseflies) though. Mosquitoes can fly for one to four HOURS: http://www.sove.org/Journal%20PDF/June%202004/Kaufmann.pdf
Mosquitoes can navigate and orient in dynamic environments without requiring external cameras and computers ( http://www.vicon.com/company/documents/UPENNGraspLab.pdf ). They can find their own sources of fuel, and avoid active and passive threats. They can even produce new mosquitoes in a few days/weeks without a factory.
They can get confused by bright/UV lights, but it's still quite impressive considering their brains are so tiny.
So these bots are interesting, but there's plenty of room for improvements :). We're still not in danger of Skynet bots yet...
BTW, the company not only pays for the tests, but I also get a salary increase for each cert earned.
As I said, that's fine since the company is paying for it. Even better that you get more $$$ out of it.
So, would you really consider the MCSE certification worth paying for out of your own pocket, and also worth your own private time to sit for the tests?
Note: I'm not talking about the "higher" Microsoft certifications.
Certifications (or titles) don't always augment. In my opinion an MCSE or equivalent low grade certification counts against you if you actually paid for it out of your own pocket. While it's not as bad as having one of those online doctorates, you've basically certified yourself as someone who voluntarily pays for useless stuff. Doesn't count against you if your employer insisted you took it, paid for it and you used it as a break from work...
There are far better Microsoft certifications to get. And if you're a "Microsoft Technical Fellow", that carries some weight.
Because Apple says stuff like this: http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/01/22/0445233/how-the-us-lost-out-on-iphone-work
Why can't that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.
Mr. Jobs's reply was unambiguous. "Those jobs aren't coming back," he said, according to another dinner guest.
'You're headed for a one-term presidency,' Jobs told Obama at the outset. To prevent that, he said, the administration needed to be a lot more business-friendly. He described how easy it was to build a factory in China, and said that it was almost impossible to do so these days in America, largely because of regulations and unnecessary costs
Dell execs in contrast just say boring/"content free" stuff like:
"Extending our relationship with Foxconn allows us to help customers grow and succeed by making the most of their IT investments, in a way they've come to expect from Dell," said Sean Corkery, vice president of Dell's supply-chain operations.
"We expect our suppliers to employ the same high standards we do in our own facilities. We enforce these standards through a variety of tools, including the Electronics Industry code of conduct, business reviews with suppliers, self-assessments and audits."
You're blind in that eye, unlike if the screw on your glasses' earpiece falls out, in which case you're blind in both eyes.
The latter is easier to fix in the field with a bit of tape. Carrying gaffer/"duct" tape around isn't that difficult, and a soldier might find it useful for lots of other stuff.
I personally carry some tape in my wallet - it's wrapped flat around a small card so doesn't take much space (and yes I've actually used it a few times to fix stuff). Not sure if you could wrap "speed tape" that way and have it reusable.
Instead of that maybe the Aussies could try to convince the Chinese that Giant Gamba Grass in Australia has medicinal properties. Might go near extinct soon after, with Australian farmers having to grow gamba grass to meet the demand ;).